🔗 Share this article

During the 70s, this gifted performer emerged as a smart, humorous, and youthfully attractive performer. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the hugely popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the attractive chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This became a television couple that audiences adored, continuing into spinoff shows like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: The Shirley Valentine Film

But her moment of her success arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This freeing, cheeky yet charming story set the stage for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a cheerful, funny, optimistic story with a superb role for a older actress, broaching the subject of women's desires that was not governed by conventional views about demure youth.

This iconic role anticipated the new debate about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Cinema

It started from Collins playing the starring part of a her career in playwright Willy Russell's 1986 theater production: the play Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic relatable female protagonist of an escapist middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of London theater and New York's Broadway and was then successfully selected in the highly successful movie adaptation. This largely followed the comparable path from play to movie of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, the play Educating Rita.

The Narrative of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a practical wife from Liverpool who is tired with life in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she receives the chance at a complimentary vacation in the Mediterranean, she takes it with both hands and – to the astonishment of the boring UK tourist she’s gone with – remains once it’s ended to encounter the authentic life beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy escapade with the roguish local, the character Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and speech by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, confiding the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned big laughs in cinemas all over the UK when her love interest tells her that he adores her skin lines and she remarks to us: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant work on the theater and on TV, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there seemed not to be a writer in the league of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She appeared in filmmaker Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in director Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the 2011 movie Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs housekeeper.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and syrupy older-age entertainments about the aged, which were not worthy of her, such as eldercare films like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as poor French-set film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a true funny character (albeit a brief appearance) in his You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy clairvoyant alluded to by the title.

However, in cinema, Shirley Valentine gave her a extraordinary time to shine.